 How cool is it to be able to take your thirty four off in a great place like Seattle? See for yourself. I found this little restaurant downtown called the "Inkeeper"  It was happy hour so I got this plate of oysters for around five bucks.  The drinks were a little spendy (and delicious) but the food made it well worth the expense. Add Comment
While driving Cab and also big trucks I realized there was a real shortage of good healthy food available for us drivers that work at night or I should say a shortage of good healthy fast food. That was about the time when I came up with the idea of starting my own healthy hamburger stand. I would call my hamburger stand business Omburger and serve mostly vegetarian fare that is nutritious and tastes good instead of contributing to the slow onslaught of obesity and diabetes that traditional american fast food seems to promote and would be healthy too! Enter the Omburger.  First I thought I would find a location and start a brick and mortar hamburger stand. But I soon realized that this would be a very expensive proposition, so I decided to look into buying a food truck as a way to make my restaurateur dreams come true. It wasn't long before I found what I thought was the perfect food truck. Notice the very creative flower over the cab! The flower is a torch and can shoot flames at night for a fliery advertisement.  Here is a photo of the interior of my very artistic "Om-Mobile" It even has hot water on demand. How cool is that!?  Now, while I thought the Om-mobile was very cool and sheik and the perfect thing for my vegetarian fast food business. The folks in Washington State where I live namely the Washington Health Dept and Labor and Industries said "Hey not so fast there you wanna be food truck maven. "Here in Washington State we have a lot more hoops that need jumped through than the folks in Oregon do. You are going to have to make a lot of improvements to your food truck in order to cook in it." (like the doors are a little too narrow and you have to have a fancy diagram and a commercial grease sucking vent thing a mabob that sticks out the top and stainless steel this and that and on and on and on. Thus my very substantial investment in a food truck became a much larger investment. So, thank goodness I have a huge pile of money laying around for just this reason. Not!!!. O.k. I have a very rich uncle that wants to throw cash my way. Yeah right. O.k. well one thing I do have is a CDL and I know how to haul cars which pays pretty good. So I've gone back to trucking in a large part in order to save my money so I can accomplish my dream of starting a vegetarian food truck restaurant. So wish me luck and I will keep you posted on how my food truck adventures work out. Have a fabulous night. So the last couple years have seen a lot of changes for me. I went from being a Trucker to driving taxi, then back to trucker. I can honestly say that both jobs are challenging and both jobs have their good side. For me driving taxi was a way to be home every day, and I enjoyed meeting and talking to lots of people. From a financial standpoint driving cab was a real hit on the ol' pocket book. Hauling cars I made over 70k. Driving taxi I made far less than that amount. I think around 25k. Taxi was cool in that I got to make personal connections with people from all walks of life and on the weekends could make over a hundred bucks in tips. Some nights I'd drive the wheel chair van and that was physically chanllenging as well as rewarding because folks in weelchairs can be some of the nicest people and really appreciate you. On the other hand working nights I sometimes was dealing with drunk folks. It sucks having to drive to a car wash to clean puke out of your cab. Driving cab I worked an eleven hour graveyard shift from six p.m. until five a.m. Unlike driving truck, I couldn't just pull over and hit the sleeper when I got tired. Nope, driving cab I had to be awake in case the radio beeped. I found myself drinking tons of coffee and energy drinks and pulling into fast food places all too often to compensate for the late hour blah's. I also found that staying on my trucker diet driving cab was not as easy as when I was driving truck. I gained back some of the weight I'd lost while trucking on my trucker diet. Driving cab and working graveyard present a whole host of challenges that driving long haul doesn't. Like higher intake of unhealthy food to compensate for lack of sleep, and lack of exercise. Hauling cars I get a lot of exercise compared to driving taxi as well as compared to most trucking jobs. Lets face it, every day I have to load my truck. This entails walking sometimes miles finding my cars, and climbing all over my truck straping the cars down. I work long hours as a trucker but I set my own hours and when I'm tired I can sleep. On the other hand, after years of trucking I was ready for a break and I don't regret driving cab at all. Health wise there is one aspect of driving cab that is better in my opinion. That is the social aspect. It's nice to have a job where you get to visit with new and interesting people every day. However the fact that I'm back hauling cars again speaks volumes. Lets face it the positives outway the negatives for the most part and those paychecks are hard to beat. If you are interested in hauling cars for a living here is a link to an article that goes into more detail... Car Hauling Article. After a year and ten months break. I'm back driving big trucks. Now it's time to resume my Trucker Diet. The cool thing about my Trucker Diet is that even while I only used it sporadically while not trucking. I still kept off most of the weight off that I'd lost. I was 367 pounds at my heaviest. I was 310 lbs (clothes on) when I took my most recent DOT physical, so that is a twelve pound gain in nearly two years. Not bad! So My Trucker Diet took the weight off. (I got down to 297) and then over the next two years working as a taxi driver, I only put twelve pounds or less back on. Now that I'm back trucking my goal is to lose 60 more pounds. First Crank some TunesThen 
"The Om Burger" Enjoy!!!Stay tuned for "Om Burger" Restaurant. Helping save The Planet, one burger at a time. Could Garlic and Onion Vegetable Soup Be the Perfect Trucker Health Food for Sedentary Drivers?01/16/2013  So I was talking to some folks I'd picked up in my cab about my trucker diet and having used it to drop sixty pounds while I was long haul trucking. And how since I'd quit long haul trucking I'd turned into a bit of a slacker and hit a plateau. They had thought that it was awesome that I'd lost all that weight and then told me about a diet they had been using involving cabbage soup. Basically they said they just ate soup for a week or two and dropped ten pounds. Thats cool I thought to myself as I stuffed the ten dollar bill they left me as a tip into my change bag and headed for my next fare. My next day off I headed to Fred Meyer to buy myself a good stockpot. The one I chose was stainless steel and held twelve quarts. It wasn't cheap though. It cost just shy of sixty bucks. I've found several good cabbage soup recipes online but ended up making my own bastardization. Thats the beauty of Veggie soup there are so many different ways you can do it there really isn't a wrong way.  Purple Cabbage because it has Iodine, Celery because it is s'posed to be good for your brain, and three hot green chilie's cut length wise to give my soup some pazaz!!!  Six Onions.  Lots of garlic like two to three bunches peeled and make sure to cut off the hard tips. Then I like to put a couple tablespoons of grapeseed oil and add all the onions and garlic together and let them brown in the bottom of the pan with one to two tablespoons of Thyme and a pinch of rosemary and salt and pepper to taste. Also I buy a bag of carrots and a bunch of mushrooms, frozen green beans,kale,bok choy and whatever else I feel like. I don't add any starches like potatoes because I like to keep it light, and no meat. I also add a quart of low sodium V-8 and a can of diced or whole tomatoes. You cant go wrong, the only thing I find that I must do too give my veggie soup good flavor is make sure to carmelize my garlic and onions till they get nice and brown and soft with the spices before I start adding the other veggies and liquids i.e. V-8 and six to eight cups water. Then I bring it to a boil for ten minutes or so and then turn it down to simmer. You can refrigerate or I like to keep the pot hot and simmering during my days off and ready to be ladled into a bowl whenever I feel hungry.   We used virgin non hydrogenated coconut oil to cook our falafel. I'm constantly on the lookout for types of food that will taste good, fill me up and be healthy. So last week I found out about the vegetarian dish falafel. Falafel was invented by the Coptic Christians in Egypt as a way to avoid meat during one of their religious holidays. The Israelis and Palestinians also both claim the falafel as their national dish. So, what the hey! with that many people all liking falafel I decided to give it a try. There are hundreds of recipes for Falafel on the internet the one I chose was from epicurious and it was called "My Favorite Falafel" by Joan Nathan. Here is the link. http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/My-Favorite-Falafel-231755 You may notice that we are frying our falafel balls. We used organic virgin coconut oil as a nice vegetarian touch. You can also bake falafel balls in the oven for a low cal. super healthy version of falafel.  Click the photo to see my delicious falafel salad in stereo. I tried to make our falafel the traditional way using pita bread to make a falafel sandwich, but the pita bread I found at the grocery store here where I live in Tri Cities Washington, is dry, tasteless, and falls apart when you try to make a pocket out of it, so I ended up making a falafel salad. I added kalamata olives and peperoncini's over spring greens, then drizzled home made tahini sauce over it as a finishing touch. It was delicious. Positive thinking university is a website started by Dr. Dave. Dr. Dave is an eye surgeon that has sailed around the world and is all about achieving his dreams and helping others do the same. His most important message is how to change your mind through positive thinking. If you are a person that is stuck in a negative place. Never fear, just spend some time at Dr. Daves website and you will feel some relief. Here's a link to Dr. Daves Positive Thinking University. | AuthorBeen trucking since 96. My main interest is having a good healthy life. ArchivesFebruary 2013 Click to set custom HTML
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